


In This Dark World and Wide

by madamebadger



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Hope, Illnesses, Singing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-25
Updated: 2014-02-25
Packaged: 2018-01-13 17:50:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1235593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madamebadger/pseuds/madamebadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the hardest thing she’s ever done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In This Dark World and Wide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [swaps55](https://archiveofourown.org/users/swaps55/gifts).



> Spoilers for Mass Effect 3. Contains references to miscarriage (due to genophage).
> 
> Written for [swaps55](http://archiveofourown.org/users/swaps55/) on the prompt "Weariness."

This is the hardest thing she’s ever done.

That isn’t something that the shaman for the Urdnot women’s clan could say lightly. She has sat in stifling darkness for days with nothing to listen to but her own breaths. She has dug her way out of a mountain with her bare hands and a shard of crystal. She has fought, hand-to-hand and in firefights; she has done so both sparring and in earnest. She has killed. She has nearly _been_ killed. She has bathed in milk and venom, and endured the hallucinatory sickness, and seen visions and spoken them. She has consigned her name to the fires (a ritual shared with the male shamans) and she has swallowed her name back into herself again in ash and obsidian (a ritual known only to the women’s shamans). 

Once she fought off a feral and starved pack of varren to protect a group of children, and lay half-dying from her wounds, and was nursed to health by her sisters, in silence, as befit her status.

She has been pregnant with her own children—born dead, every one.

She has sat with her sisters who suffered the same.

She has howled at the sky because that was easier than crying.

This is harder. This is more exhausting.

“Eve,” Mordin says, and she opens her eyes.

(That’s a very salarian thing, that he calls her Eve. If you refuse to give your name to another krogan, they’ll probably try to beat it out of you—same goes for batarians and most turians. Asari and humans will dance around it, not calling you anything. It’s a very _salarian_ solution to make up something else to call you.

She’d be offended, except she’s too amused to be offended.)

“Doctor,” she says. As soon as she opens her mouth, she can feel the tickle at the back of her throat that makes her want to cough—a tickle that quickly becomes an itch, an itch that just as quickly becomes a tearing pain. She won’t cough, though, not until she has to. It’s a small victory, swallowing the cough, holding it in, making her lungs a cage and keeping it captive, but it’s what she can do.

Her body aches, every motion and every breath a struggle. Even the effort of sitting upright with her arms across her knees is a strain. 

“How are you feeling?” He blinks twice, eyelids sliding up over liquid-black eyes.

How to explain to him? The other women Maelon experimented on are all dead, and she knows why, she _knows_. Krogan have redundancy built into almost every biological system they have, and on top of that they can regenerate. If you don’t kill a krogan outright in the first traumatic injury, it’s almost impossible to do them in. That’s why the genophage was needed, after all: they couldn’t kill the living krogan, so they attacked the not-yet-living.

The other female krogan who died from Maelon’s experiments didn’t die because their systems were overwhelmed, or because they were hurt too badly. That’s not how krogan die. They died because they were exhausted. They died because they gave in, finally. They stopped fighting. They _rested_.

The shaman for the Urdnot women’s clan isn’t stronger than they were, or more resilient, or more deserving, or more lucky. She’s just too damned stubborn to give in to her bone-deep weariness. With every breath, with every swallow, with every pulse of her blood, she _chooses_ to be alive, and that choice—as all choices—has a cost.

There’s no way to explain that to a salarian, a species who burn their lives like kindling: quick-fire, bright, and short-lived. So she said, “I’m all right, doctor.”

He cocks his head for a moment, but when she doesn’t explain further, he doesn’t press. He says, “Nausea? Headache? Cramps?”

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

Blink-blink. “Didn’t ask if you can handle it. Not asking to be polite. Asking for useful medical data.” He pauses, blinks again, his strange crimped mouth twitching with what she suspects is amusement. “Nausea? Headache? Cramps?”

She can’t stop herself chuckling, and the cough that she’s been swallowing back finally comes through, starting as a hoarse dry hack and building into something that doubles her over. Mordin waits a few seconds to see if she will master herself—and she does. (That’s another thing: he will _let_ her cough for a few seconds to allow her to overcome it on her own. If she can’t, he’ll use the cold spray that numbs the back of her throat and stops the cough. But only then.)

“Some nausea,” she says. “No headache. No cramps, except in the bottom of my feet, which I can’t imagine is related.”

He considers her solemnly. “All information is good information.”

“Not _all_ information, doctor.”

“All information,” he says, so firmly that she laughs, and nearly starts coughing again. (She doesn’t. That’s another small victory. It will have another price.)

“All right, then. My robes are chafing at the back of my neck. You can mark that down under ‘all information.’”

And to her amusement, he _does_. (This is why she trusts him, although Wrex will not ever understand. Wrex is too angry to understand. The males have in some way suffered more under the genophage than the females have, because the grief of the women is uncomplicated. And the women at least have a future: all the women coming together to raise the one child in a thousand that they can bear. The men have no future, only an eternal present, adolescents and adults but no children, no pregnancy, no sure knowledge, even, if they have sired a child. It has never been good for the krogan to be separated like this, males from females, children from sires, for generations. They need each other to have a whole history, past and present and future.)

“You should sleep,” Mordin says, now, his voice calm and calming. “Sedative?”

She knows he asks entirely _pro forma_ , because although he offers daily she never accepts the sedative. She is so tired, but she doesn’t dare drug herself to sleep. Maelon kept her drugged more often than not. Maelon—

“Sing to me instead,” she says.

He sighs, an exaggerated expression that she knows he doesn’t mean, and blinks rapidly. “Krogan Queen?” he asks.

“No, you sang that earlier today,” she says. “Sing me something new.” She lies down and rolls over, carefully, to the comfortable position on her belly, with her arms and legs tucked warmly under her and her armored hump protecting her. Not that she needs protection, not on the Normandy, not now—but after being kept in restraints for so long, the ability to turn over into her favored position is a pleasure and a blessing.

She can hear the busy silence of him thinking, and then he begins: 

“My eyes are fully open to my awful situation  
I shall go now to Tuchanka and provide an explanation  
That the varren that I got from there were more than I could handle  
And I feel I must admit to this so as to prevent a scandal  
Because creatures from Tuchanka are admirable and daring  
But the Citadel could not handle the crowds that they were scaring—”

He’s into his own invented riff, now, waving his arms demonstratively. She closes her eyes and smiles.

(Someday she will tell him her name. Someday. Urdnot Bakara is a person of importance, a person who is known, a person who must carry the weight put on her. Urdnot Bakara is the name that the woman’s shaman of Urdnot burned to ash when she became a shaman, and then chewed with fireglass and cinders and swallowed and brought back into herself. Urdnot Bakara is an old name, a name with meaning. 

Eve, though, Eve has no past. Eve can rest easy.)

“—and though varren are at best when they are tearing foes apart  
That is not an activity that the Council takes to heart.”

The beating of her twin pulses falls into sync with his song, and the women’s shaman of the Urdnot, who is called Bakara, who is called _Eve_ … sleeps, finally, deeply.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Milton's [On His Blindness](http://www.bartleby.com/101/318.html). Mordin's song is an adaptation (with apologies...) of Gilbert & Sullivan's patter song, "My Eyes are Fully Open," used (with varying lyrics) in both Ruddigore and The Pirates of Penzance.


End file.
